A new look at gameplay from the upcoming Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons just dropped during gamescom Opening Night Live, and it shows enough to generate legitimate excitement from fans of open-world action RPGs, especially for players who prefer freedom vs. a checklist of objectives.
Last week, I attended a press briefing showcasing the video ahead of its reveal, and the meeting also included Invoke Studios’ Dominic Guay (studio head) and Jeff Hattem (vice president of creative), who excitedly spoke about showing off the game to the public for the first time after a cinematic teaser debut last year at The Game Awards.
The Montreal-based studio’s pedigree includes devs who have worked on games and franchises like Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Deus Ex, but this game feels decidedly different, and its main goal seems to be giving the players freedom and choice on how to approach everything from traversal to combat to open-world exploration with RPG progression elements.
Invoke calls it all “a fluid, systems-driven approach to exploration and combat, where observation and experimentation can uncover new paths, create unexpected solutions and produce spectacular combinations.” As an example, in the gameplay footage, the titular character Kaatri uses spells to create platforms to traverse an area, and battles enemies by combining magic with melee to open up opportunities for destruction, like literally making it rain so enemies take more damage from lightning attacks.
“The player has a lot of agency in how they explore the world,” Guay said. “It’s exploration-driven open world, so you’re not just going to follow a waypoint. We don’t want to be heavy-handed in guiding you through the world. You’re gonna have tools, we’re gonna offer you tools to move so you can story forward so you can find what you’re looking for, but you really have to engage with the world. And as you do, as you explore, you’ll find gear so you can choose which gear you want to equip. Some of them have traits, so depending on your play styles, you may want to use certain gear more than others. Also, depending on the type of enemies you’re dealing with.”
In Warlock, Kaatri (voiced by sci-fi icon Tricia Helfer) is guided by her patron, Tasha (voiced by Maggie Robertson of Resident Evil Village’s Lady Dimitrescu fame), and she travels the realm of Darkon on a personal quest. But we don’t know much about that yet, other than that she’s “trying to find someone that she cares about” in the strange land of Darkon.
What we do know, though, is that magic spells dictate everything Kaatri does, including being the game’s main source of progression: gaining new spells to get stronger and gain access to new parts of the world and story.
“A lot of these [spells] are optional finds, so I might find spells that someone doesn’t find, and that’s gonna change how I play the game,” Guay said. “It can have a pretty significant impact in how you play.”
Kaatri is also further guided by an imp companion named Skev, who’s also revealed in the gameplay video, who helps acclimate her to the unfamiliar world around her, as she is “a stranger in a strange land” in Warlock.
“He is a native of the land, and he’ll be there to help you explore this realm for the first time and give you a little bit of insight,” Hattem said, evoking memories of Mímir in God of War. “But he’s not just there as a companion to kind of give you color commentary of what’s going on, he also has utility and he can help you along the way in his own way.”
Weapons, spells, and potions will all have their own sort of progression to create more “gameplay variables,” but the devs continued to emphasize how important exploration was to Warlock, making it sound like a sandbox with some guidance as opposed to a linear story.
“While there is a lot of agency in how you progress your character, you also will gain a lot of breadth and utility from exploring the world and finding the stuff that’s around there,” Hattem said. “As designers, we are setting up to have a really fun and engaging world to explore, but it’s also challenging, and players that do take the time to explore the world and find its many secrets and uncover its mysteries will get rewarded.”
Thankfully (and mercifully), the devs said that players won’t need to be well-versed in D&D to grasp or enjoy Warlock, but some of the elements of the world, its people, and locations in it will be immediately familiar to anyone who is.
“On the team, a lot of us are fans of the brand,” Guay said. “We expect some players will bring a lot of knowledge with them, and hopefully they enjoy what we’re doing, how we’re referencing that lore, that universe. Some of these things are more ‘mainstream’ within the brand, some are gonna be deep cuts, and we’re having fun with that. For us, it was a huge inspiration.”
But given how important exploration is to the game’s core concept, seeing it all through the lens of the “stranger” Kaatri seems like a fitting decision, especially for a noob like me.
“We want to create a game where if you never engaged with D&D before, it’s not a problem,” Guay said. “So, you come in and you learn what you need to learn as you play it, you don’t feel like you’re missing out. That’s not cool to feel that. We have a couple of people in the team who have very little experience with D&D and we use them as guinea pigs to make sure that we make the right decision on that front.”
When it comes to attracting certain players, the devs were keen on hammering home the point that they want them to discover and play things themselves with little guidance. By the sounds of it, the type of gamer who needs or wants an objective icon at every turn may be scared away from Warlock.
“What I’m really stoked about with this game is that we’re going into it with the belief that players don’t necessarily always want to be told what to do, and told what the solution is, and told where to go, how to play,” Hattem said. “We’re coming at this with the perspective that players want to experiment, they want to explore, they want to find their own way forward. It’s a big ask, we’re asking players to engage with the world, we’re asking them to explore, to pay attention, and I think that for players that do come in to the game with that mindset, I think they will be rewarded with a fun experience to carve their own path in this world.”
Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons joins the ever-growing list of awesome-looking titles that will be launching in 2027.
